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After roughly two years of battling, Meta has agreed to reach a settlement with the state of Texas for $1.4 billion, after the company was suspected of using biometric data of users without permission.
Filed in 2022, the lawsuit said that Meta, the major technology company that owns and operates apps like Facebook and Instagram, was in violation of a Texas state law that prevents the selling of residents biometric information without their consent.
This lawsuit comes one year after the company said that it was shutting down it's facial-recognition systems entirely, due to concerns about privacy and possible misuse by bad actors.
At the time, about a third of Facebook users opted into the feature, but overtime was slowly phasing it out due to backlash from both users of the social networking site and courts around the country.
Even with the insane amount of money that was pulled out of Facebook's grubby hands, they're still in the green, as the tech giant has made roughly $12 billion in the first three months of this year, and are expected to see a much larger increase when they share their second-quarter earnings on Wednesday.
Facebook as a company is so large and vast, that even when faced with lawsuit after lawsuit, there's nothing for them to worry about. They know by and large that with the amount of information about their users that they have, they can pay off any flimsy fine that gets handed to them.
To think that there's so many of us that actively oppose the use of our information by these tech giants and yet everything about us is still being sold.
